Guys, i've reached a stage where i need to move a 12TB drive out of my array, hopefully without incident. I have read the manual and have a question. Is a there any way that the current dual parity can help me here or is it the case that once i remove the outgoing drive and a new parity sync gets underway that's it, i'm on my own so to speak.  Can it be made to work in a similar manner to adding a drive when dual parity will protect me in the event of too many drives failing. I'm just a bit wary that i've been hammering the array recently and possibly this one more parity sync could be one too many. Ironically the outgoing drive is going towards extending a second array to accommodate a further backup of this array which currently only gets a backup of 50% of the contents. Am i over thinking this and should i just get on with it and sod the consequences?

Edited February 26, 20242 yr by superloopy1

Nobody had to do this then?

With 2 parity drives there's no way around a parity rebuild. If you cleared the drive before removing, and did the parity rebuild in maintenance mode (array offline) you'd still get protection against one drive failure while doing so.

Expanding and replacing is easy, removing is possible but not expected nor trivial.

Edited February 28, 20242 yr by Kilrah

thanks for replying. is this 'parity rebuild in maintenance mode' documented anywhere?

Just need to Check "maintenance mode" before starting the array, rest is the same.

what changes to make it 'less iikely' to drop a disk though when using dual parity?

, sorry that read wrongly. how can dual parity be better at protecting the array when parity check running in maintenance mode moreorless is the question.

You could resync just one of the parity drives, in maintenance mode, and keep the other one intact, if there's a problem the old one would still be valid, as long as you still have the removed disk.